


Jeeves in the East End

by Fluxit_Aqua_et_Sanguine



Category: Jeeves & Wooster, Jeeves - P. G. Wodehouse
Genre: Eventual Relationships, Eventual Romance, F/M, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Mystery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-23
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2018-09-01 14:55:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 20,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8628676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fluxit_Aqua_et_Sanguine/pseuds/Fluxit_Aqua_et_Sanguine
Summary: Bertie Wooster, a gallant young man about town, is gently blackmailed by one of his school friends into taking a run-down apartment in a most unseemly neighborhood of London. What he and Jeeves find there will leave them both irrevocably changed.(This is my first real attempt at writing as Bertie, un-beta'd and un-Brit-picked. Hope that it holds up, despite.)





	1. Cat and Mouse

**Author's Note:**

> As stated in the description: This is my first Bertie-voice fic, un-beta'd and un-Brit-picked. I can see it not sounding right to a true devotee of the books (or anyone else, frankly.) I've not read all of the novels, and admit to being more familiar with the Fry and Laurie TV series. Also, I'm not used to writing characters who don't do a lot of introspective rambling.
> 
> I hope that it's okay, despite these things, and that some people might enjoy it. I might come out with more, in that case. XP
> 
> Thanks very much for reading!
> 
> EDIT: Made a stupid mistake. Is rectified now. 
> 
> -Raven

There are times when the stage is jolly well set. I mean to say, there are times when a place is so brimming with atmosphere, fitted out with all the sober gothic style of the Victorians and all the creaks of an old flat that it feels just a step from being written into an old-fashioned thriller, caped villain and all.

So it was when I found myself in the middle of an abandoned old flat in Soho, in the above Victorian garb (that Jeeves would adore, I knew, for all its musty, damask thingness.) It was all coated in a choking layer of dust, though—hadn’t seen the feathers for centuries, it seemed….

I’ve done it again, haven’t I? In the middle of the race, in medius—beginning in the middle of the tale and forgetting all the bally expose so my dear readers will know where the whole sitch is coming from. But the meat of the story’s just what you want to hear, right?  I can always let you piece it together as we go along…. No? Well, then….

I, one B. Wooster, esquire, last of the noble Wooster line and heir to the Marquis-dom of Yaxley, was in a spot of bother. You see, this last of the Woosters is of a particularly sunny disposish. Always delighted to help a friend or brother or what have you, especially if said friend or brother hails from the fine old school. Always willing to sacrifice life, limb or a fair bit of cash for the improvement of a friend’s lot.

What I was reluctant to part with was my bed.

You see, the generosity of this last Wooster was such that he was being forced to _move._ His unwillingness to let a chap drown in the soup had motivated him thus. He spares no comfort, no luxury to allow a fellow graduate a leg up. Even if it does mean some tearing at the wallpaper on his way out the door. I wasn’t full-steam on this idea at first—the thought of leaving the homey comfort I’d established in Berkeley Mansions was a severe kick in the trousers. Almost more than a Wooster could bear.

It all started when my pal Algernon ‘Mousey’ Mottershead came to visit. He’d started at Oxford just at the tail-end of my stint, and had always seemed a small chap in every way: small frame; small, twitchy nose; small soul. A follower, you see. But he’d warmed up to everyone in time and managed to squeeze in among Bertram’s dearest chums within the year. And on this day he’d scurried over to my flat out of the blue sky of one of autumn’s finest with real terror in his voice.

“Oh, Bertie….” There was disaster looming in those syllables. “It’s a _disaster!”_ He moaned, his grey eyes flitting here and there about the room. Jeeves barely had time to pluck Mousey’s overcoat from his shoulders before the twitchy frame collapsed into a nearby armchair.

“Disaster, old thing?” I questioned him with warm gaiety in the hopes of countering his tenebrous—if ‘tenebrous’ is the word I want—state of being. There had but moments before been grand plans of tottering around to the Drones to pick up Boko and Bingo for a new musical-theatre production that evening, but I could tell already that whatever crises had befallen young Mousey would require a full hour at the least.

The sitch was presented thusly: Mousey had an aunt who was frightfully keen on good works. She was always pottering about the East End, standing a meal here and hosting an activity there. And she was positively bent on the idea that Mousey, too, should be going out on the town, personally sponsoring some poor chumps who had fallen down into a certain station in life. This aunt of his would be loathing to hear that any requests from Mousey, no matter how small, until he could show her something he’d done of adequate selflessness for the downtrodden folks of London.

And Mousey had a real devil of a request this time: He wanted to marry a little milkmaid he’d met on a scenic trip through Lincolnshire, a girl with nothing but one silk dress and a fell pony to her name. Now, no aunt in Aunt Mousey’s posish would dare allow a girl of that sort into the family—the poor girl supposedly had none of her own to give the ancestral push to the proposed union, and I’m given to believe that names are nothing short of the bee’s patellae to the standard aunt. To even begin to hope that he would get away with his liver and his love, Mousey had to show that he was essentially rehabilitating a group of poor people by the sheer goodness of his heart.

The trouble with all that being that Mousey was no great man of service—the fellow was quite used to all the comforts of plenty of cash and ample loafing room, you see. I tried coaxing the spirit out of him first. A man has to try, and, really, it would have been simpler just for old Mousey to bite the bullet, as it were.

I didn’t think that drastic measures needed be taken, at first. There are plenty of bust blokes in London, a thousand men who’d gladly take a certain sum off of Mousey’s paws to pretend that he was under the old boy’s care for half an hour. Mousey claimed it was no good.

“I told Aunt Millicent that I was helping a man about my age in Soho,” he said lowly, toying with a cigarette between nervous fingers. “And that he’d been fixed up with suits and baubles for his house by yours truly, not to mention instruction on how to earn an honest living.”

“But why can’t you try all that? Sounds simple enough to me,” I said, glancing back at a quietly-thinking Jeeves (no doubt firing bright on his luncheon fish.) Mousey tossed his little head at me.

“No! I _can’t,_ don’t you see? She thinks I’m a great reformer, that I’ve changed some overgrown urchin into Oxford material. I don’t have the money for the suit; I can’t imagine a bloke desperate enough to play the part I want without loads of oof.

“The old lady needs a picture, see,” he explained, by way of accentuating the seriousness of his problem. “The image of one of those jobless johnnies in Soho… to convince her that I’m doing all I can… but I don’t know any.” I thought the matter laughably simple.

“Well, perhaps Jeeves could –”

“I don’t _want_ to know any,” he ejaculated, pale eyes flashing. “Louts, all of them. Without the necessary rhino backing me up, I’ll never get one of them to agree that he’s my protégé… and Aunt Millicent’s cut back on me ever since she got started with those East-End blighters….”

“Jeeves… how does a man acquire a protégé without meeting said man?” I said, thoroughly stumped like a disciple without a parable. Jeeves’ eyes had a certain flash of their own to them.

“I believe that I may have a solution on that front,” his voice rumbled behind me. I daresay my eyes flashed, too, if only because the eyebrows had just made a mad dash for my hairline.

“I say, Jeeves,” I cried, the voice tinged with the requisite awe, “old Alexander should’ve had you at his right hand on meeting Gordias’ knot.”

“Thank-you, sir. I must warn you, however, that the plan requires a certain amount of sacrifice on your part.”

Now we return to a point of reluctance in the heart of old B.W.W.: in the past, when asked to do some ‘small thing’ of my own volition, out of simple, gentlemanly chivalry, I’ve been asked to climb up drainpipes to steal cheques, charged to sneer at and make off with silver cow-creamers; tried to help a pal out with a girl and found myself covered in flour from stem to stern. I couldn’t help the sigh in my voice when I replied,

“Get on with it, Jeeves,” with as much resignation as said Jeeves himself in the face of a merry banjolele chord or toot of the trombone.

“Thank-you, sir. I believe that if Mister Mottershead were to request someone of your station to take a Soho address, I fancy it would be simple to convince the aunt in question of all that has been said.” I scoffed.

“Oh, come, Jeeves,” I laughed, derisively. “No-one at the Drones would give up his bed for a plank in Soho.” I confess that I’d missed the thrust of Jeeves’ suggestion.

“What I mean to suggest is that you yourself, sir, act the part of the protégé. In order to lend complete verisimilitude to the charade, you might take an apartment in Soho and live there for some time. Enough that the woman visits you and observes substantial improvement in your person as a result of your tutelage by Mister Mottershead.”

I confess: I goggled. I goggled at Jeeves like one of his landed tarpon, shocked and betrayed. Of course, he’d simply spoken, but I could tell by the toothy smile blooming over Mousey’s little face that the old boy was ready to accept the wheeze as advertised.

“Jeeves, that is positively _brilliant!”_ Mousey squeaked, and leapt up in his excitement. “If you could just find an apartment down there, and fixed it up for me… Aunt Millicent could come down any time, and I’d never have to worry!”

“Yes, yes, but… Mousey, old thing,” I began, a tremor of supplication (if that’s the word I want) in the voice, “think of the Hell to which you would be condemning old Bertram. Thrusting him in among those blighters that _you_ won’t touch with a ten-foot pole… it all seems rather unsporting.”

I could have spotted the first signs miles off: The bright, clear, wide eyes of the hierophant, begging silently for my acquiescence. (Or was it supplicant? Shall have to ask Jeeves later.) I think I may’ve even spotted a tremor of young Mousey’s lower lip. I remained unmoved.

“But—”

“Ah-ah! Mousey,” I chided. One had to be swift on the bud-nipping with these young fellows. Given an inch, will take a mile and all that. “No amount of this childish display will sway me.”

“But we were at _school_ together!”

I tutted at the boy and placed a sympathetic hand on his little shoulder. “Mousey,” I said, in the most stately of Wooster voices, “if a man must live by the decrees of his school-mates alone, he shall soon find himself embroiled in… oh, what was it the Bard said, Jeeves?”

“Treasons, stratagems and spoils, sir?”

“That’s the baby! Yes, treasons, stratagems and spoils.” I knew this all too well. Memories of a certain Glossop and a certain wager brought a wince to the Wooster dial.

One expects abject quivering despair at this point. One assumes one will have to have one’s perfectly-pressed valet mop the puddle-like remnants of his guest off of one’s fine wool carpet. It hits the heart hard, of course; one isn’t indifferent to the trouble of schoolmates. But some things are beyond even the generosity of Bertram Wooster.

There were no signs of melting from Mousey as I looked upon his map again. If anything, he was grinning. But I took no note at the time, determined as I was to teach this lesson to my ill-educated friend.

“I can’t do this, Mousey. The Code of the Woosters makes exceptions for outrageous demands made upon one of its clansmen.” I’d turned around to face him face-to-face, as it were, and only then really noticed the look he’d taken on. He was laughing quietly; he smiled where frowns were much more the accepted choice of expression.

“Oh, Bertie,” he sighed. A regular jocular gent had taken the place of my shrinking young pal. I gazed at him, besotted. Or perhaps bemused. “It would have been so much easier for everyone if you’d just agreed to help…. Oh, what a _shame_ it all is…”

“What?” The voice sharpened a touch further; I pulled it back into my own genial suavity sharpish. I said I wouldn’t be moved by him, and I was determined that I would not. “What _are_ you blathering on about, old thing? ‘Everyone’? There is but you and this sainted aunt of yours to worry about. I perceive no ‘everyone.’”

“Bertie!” The brow furrowed instinctively at the manner Mousey had acquired. A cross between an over-enthusiastic winner at the races and a man who’s just been told that his impression of _The Scream_ means the difference between life and death. His voice had circus fleas performing their way down his spine. “You haven’t forgotten that I have a beloved cousin, have you? A darling red-haired sprite called _Bobbie Wickham?”_

I confess: I _had_ forgotten. I’d been told of it in passing before. It was a distant, marriage-bound sort of relation, but the Motterheads and the Wickhams really were tied together.

‘Why the fuss?’ I hear you cry. You must understand that I’ve held a certain flame for this Bobbie Wickham for some time. A jovial girl with a lovely toned frame from her action on the tennis courts and really ravishing red curls. I’d been seeing much of the fine young potato of late and had designs on making her my wife.

Not that this all mattered, I realized, after a moment of silent musing. Mousey knew Bobbie. What harm did this do me?

“Tut!” I cried.

“What?” The Mousey squeaked.

“I said ‘tut.’ Denounced you. Decried your foolish methods. You’re talking through your hat, old man.”

“How so?”

“Well, you _know_ this Bobbie. A charming girl in all respects, and friend of one B. Wooster. What would be achieved by a little Mousey squeaking in her ear that this B. Wooster refused to participate in his bally scheme? Why, I imagine she’d offer hearty congratulations on this Wooster’s good judgment.”

Mousey, true to this foul new form he’d taken on, let out one of the gay and cheerful ones. “Oh, Bertie….” I was tiring of hearing that phrase. “Don’t you recall that night?... That fateful Oxford boat race night that nearly had old Bertram _expelled?”_

The armor of Wooster pride began to slip at that. “Mousey—”

“ _I_ remember it like it was just yesterday,” he sighed, gazing wistfully up at my ceiling. “A near-graduate called Bertie Wooster was seen sneaking onto the boat of a competing party with a bag of sorts….”

“Mousey, please.” I don’t like to say I was pleading with him, but hearing him tell the tale had the ring of an executioner reading off what tortures I was to receive at the Queen’s pleasure.

“And, near the middle of the race, a certain team found its decks overrun by flea-bitten barn rats….”

“But Mousey, surely—”

“And witnesses had _seen_ this Bertram Wooster commit crime; they _claimed_ to, anyhow. But they were mistaken. A freshman called Algernon Mottershead stepped forward and claimed responsibility, gaining a criminal record but selflessly saving his dear friend.”

I’d been blackmailed many times before, by the likes of Byngs, Glossops and others. Regularity didn’t make it any easier. My stomach was always tied in awful knots by the end of it, and I could feel my grasp on the situation slipping away like so much sand. I couldn’t help thinking that Mousey should’ve tried this kind of eloquence on his aunt; I imagine he could’ve gotten away with anything if he only had the goods on _her,_ as well.

The gaze had flickered on and off to Jeeves during the whole ordeal. He was pensive. Although the light of intelligence still gleamed in those blue eyes of his, there was no move to speak, no twinkle to the eye that told me he’d contrived a way out. I was doomed.

“Mousey….” I’d said his name many times that evening. By degrees it’d slipped, from cheerful greeting of an old friend down to the beaten thing it was after Mousey’s threats. “Fine. I’ll move out to a tenement in Soho for you. Bertram will languish in a vermin-infested apartment all for you and your blessed milkmaid.”

“Oh, _thank-you_ , Bertie!”

“But never, _never_ approach me about Bobbie again,” I told him, with a sound prod to the chest. “You’ve no right to be meddling in a Wooster’s _affaires de cœur_. It’s simply unsporting.”

“Yes, yes, fine,” the Mousey muttered, already on the path to collecting his coat and hat from Jeeves. “Wonderful! You’ll write me as soon as you’ve settled in, right? Good. Tinkerty-tonk!”

And, just like that, he was gone.


	2. The Silent Second

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A momentous event in the Wooster-Jeeves household has Bertie wondering what's gotten into his manservant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the support thus far!! You will find that I'm not the best at getting out writing. I have ideas, but I have trouble realizing them. Plus, I'm still not sure that my Bertie-voice is okay and feel kind of like I'm just making feeble attempts at taking bits of the 'Bertie-voice' formula and sticking them together. And, as I say, I remain un-Beta-ed. Have no good excuse for that fact.
> 
> Well, as always, I hope you enjoy!

The moment Mousey closed the door behind him, I fell back into an armchair and turned the baby blues towards Jeeves.

Now, one doesn’t mean to be overly-critical—one must give one’s fellow man all the allowances one would want oneself, and all that—but I found my man’s silence disturbing. Through the whole of the interview he’d thrown me to the dogs. Why, I daresay he even sprinkled some anise seed over me in the form of that blasted suggestion to Mousey about a Soho apartment. And not one _word_ to rescue young Bertram from that most of ungentlemanly acts, the threat of blackmail.

I looked at my valet with a real wonder. Now, many chaps had had reason to do so before—on account of the chiseled countenance or some machination of his mighty brain that had had them knocked sideways—but this was a different thing entirely. I’d been betrayed by the man. Picked up as a brother and wrung out as in the hands of a particular Judas. And I’d put my trust in him to help this Mousey! Not to cast his employer aside, to value this little man more than his master.

It was rather like Constable Dobbs’ unfortunate situation with the cosh. One moment one was standing quite upright, doing one’s duty in chasing ne’er-do-wells up trees (metaphorically, of course,) and the next, one has taken a blow on the mazzard so shocking that it seemed as if a thunderbolt had come down from the hand of Zeus himself. I’d no need to see the light as Dobbs did, however—I won a Scripture Knowledge prize when I was just a lad, after all—and was, instead, simply shocked into oblivion for a few moments before rising again with all the anger of the unjustly thunderbolted.

For, you see, there was no need to cosh the young master in this way. Perhaps I would understand if there were some rift between us—perhaps Jeeves had taken it to heart when the young master argued the benefits of a gaily patterned tie—but there was nothing that I could think of. None of the usual stuff to make Jeeves go off his feed.

“Jeeves,” I sighed, kneading the temples. A distinct ache had taken up residence in the Wooster melon since Mousey had scurried back into his hole in the wall.

Jeeves had been my attendant for some time, you understand. Long enough that one imagined he was stationed firmly within the realm of Bertram’s allies. Yet here he was, making wholesale sacrifices of the young master simply to allow a young wastrel to squeeze his way out of a tight spot. One he’d made for himself, no less, and perpetuated by his own foibles. (Fails? Foils? I shall have to consult Jeeves. With due reluctance.) What drove the man thus? I furrowed the brow and waggled the finger at him.

“Jeeves,” I started again, conviction in every syllable. Or, rather, the one syllable I’d presented him with. “What is the meaning of this? I didn’t bid you sell the young master’s soul away for this Mousey! And you don’t even bother to extend a hand to the young master to save him from this frightful tureen you’ve dumped him in? Not a word to save him from the lion’s mouth?”

He quavered. Well, I mean to say, he looked as impassive as a man who’s just had a particularly uninteresting cab ride through Mayfair in attendance of a maiden aunt. But the barest of pauses spoke hundreds in the language of Jeeves, and I was moved by this one. After the momentous Silent Second, he spoke.

“I’m afraid I don’t take your meaning, sir.” Ah, so it was going to be _that_ game. I gave a subtle ‘tchah’ and said airily,

“Yes you _do_ , Jeeves. You know you didn’t do your best by the young master, condemning him—and likely yourself, unless you should weasel out—to a tenement in Soho. And for what? For amusement? To justify some personal curiosity? _Why,_ Jeeves?”

Another pause. It seemed the day for novelly unpleasant things. “I only meant to suggest a suitable ruse to Mister Mottershead, sir. If you disapproved of the scheme, sir, you might have refused to assent to it.”

And _there_ stood the absolute frozen limit.

“Oh, yes? I could’ve refused young Mousey while he has the threat of severance from Bobby Wickham hanging over my head? Think _straight,_ Jeeves!” It wasn’t like my man to ignore the facts in this way… again, not unless he had some quarrel with me. But there was nothing, unless the mere presence of the young master had finally started to get to him and he’d started to tire of me generally.

“I only intended to aid Mister Mottershead per your instructions, sir.” Somehow he remained impassive, as though immune to the supreme goofiness falling from his mouth.

I hit upon it just then. _Rem acu teti—_ whatsit. There was no rift between Jeeves and self, no reason I could see that he’d want to do this thing… but one. I turned to the man, and said in my most solemn, reproving voice, “You just can’t resist a _scheme,_ can you, Jeeves?”

He faltered. Not in the manner of a normal man, of course—a mere understated, sheep-like cough into the back of his wrist and a gaze into the distance comprised it—but I could tell that I’d backed him into a corner slightly. One gets to know one’s companions, no matter how stoic, when one has lived with them for months. I recall a time when I could tell from a mere glance at his expression how long it would take for Bingo to propose to his new ‘goddess’ of the hour.

Thus, I could read even this incomprehensible volume that was Jeeves. And what I saw in it truly surprised me. Although Jeeves could never seem anything less than dignified, there was something imperfect in his dignity just then. It was lessened by atoms, and I could feel it in every second he failed to respond to me.

“I mean to say… what? You could’ve said that you knew of no solution with ease. You could have held your tongue when this _grand_ idea came to you, as you must know that it’s going to bring about Hell for the both of us. But, no—you _had_ to suggest it, even knowing Mousey would latch onto the first intelligent thing you offered him.” I couldn’t keep the groan out of my voice. It was too much, this thing that had happened. I could use a drink already, and I hadn’t even moved from my chair. _“What_ have you set us up for, Jeeves?”

The silence Jeeves left between us began to be oppressive after some moments. I was prepared to speak again, to induce him to say _anything,_ when he finally drew himself up, and, gazing fixedly at the wall opposite, chose some words for the young master:

“I apologize, sir.” Now _there_ was one for the books! No undertone of superiority, no subtle suggestion that the young master go boil his head. A genuine solemn apology from Jeeves. You could’ve knocked me over with an f. “You’re quite right, sir; the scheme offers much in the way of Mister Mottershead and significant sacrifice on your part with no tangible return. If you will allow me, I might contact Mister Mottershead and—”

“No, no, Jeeves,” I interrupted. This subservient air Jeeves had taken on was truly disturbing. Perhaps not on the level of being thrust into the arms of one of Aunt Agatha’s eligible females, but disturbing nonetheless. My anger cooled towards the man in an instant. Though frustrated, still, I couldn’t help but wanting to remove this pall that had fallen over him. “It’s all been squared away, now… and I suppose that I can do this thing for Mousey if it means getting in with a relative of Bobbie’s. When this is all over and Mousey’s out in the countryside with his milkmaid, all might be revealed to Bertram’s benefit. I’ll finally have something more impressive than a Scripture Knowledge prize to tout to her family.”

“Very true, sir. If that will be all, sir?”

“Yes, that will be all, Jeeves.” I cocked an inquisitive eyebrow at the man as he left. That attitude hung about him, still, like… something that hangs down and won’t be moved for the world.  A bat, perhaps? A limpet? At any rate, there was something not at all oojah-cum-spiff about Jeeves just then, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure what it was.

The last time I recalled seeing Jeeves in such an attitude was… well, now that I think on it, there was nothing even remotely similar to Jeeves’ present attitude. There were times when he’d pouted at me, yes—over the matter of having to choose Skeldings instead of Monte Carlo for Christmas, for example; or the time I’d taken ownership of a moustache—but never had he seemed so… miserable.

But that was no matter for the moment. The attempts to dredge up a bright side to the matter were purely in response to Jeeves’ sudden tac—thingummy. Tacitude? Tactfulness?... Taciturnity! Anyhow, the thrust of the matter is that I was still being faced with forced eviction from my beautiful flat on the grounds of helping out a ‘friend’ who would undoubtedly have given me away for much less than Jeeves if it meant hitching up to his dear Mabel. (Was ‘Mabel’ her name? It was one of those provincial monikers, at any rate.)

“Jeeves,” I called, unsure of response. “I shall be at the Drones, if anyone should call. All telegrams can be left until tomorrow morning.”

“Very good, sir,” a dark voice drifted out into the sitting-room. With that, I was off. I didn’t need Jeeves to depress me any further than he already had.


	3. Lachrymosa

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bertie toddles off to the Drones for a dose of well-deserved pity. A certain Glossop offers his opinion on matters. Even a spot of philosophy fails to bring light to the present situation.

The Drones was ever my refuge. My manna in the wilderness; my coffee and cigars after dinner with the Glossop clan. There was little that couldn’t be overcome by its fine, genteel atmosphere. A good game of dinner-roll cricket or an impromptu meeting of the Fine Arts committee could melt even the stoniest of hearts, and mine was approaching Blarney proportions by the evening-time.

Thus, I threw myself unto the bosom of my fellow Drones. I came in sighing, as one does after an interview with a friend who’s fallen into the art of blackmail. I sighed about how I would shortly be going to Beefy Bingham’s good, clean lad’s entertainments as my only solace; how I would be unlikely to be at the club for at least a week and desperately needed a stiff drink for every night I’d be missing while stuffed into a hole in the wall in Soho. I admit that I might’ve made the whole thing seem a touch more dramatic in its telling at the club, but what of it? There’s no point in taking up the medium of storytelling if one is going to bore one’s audience.

After a drink or two, I told them all: How Mousey had infested my home, crying out that he _needed_ someone to help him in winning his true love; how Bertram, ever the selfless friend, had offered to help out of the goodness of his spirit. I told them of the treacherous servant who decided to sacrifice his master, one noble B. Wooster, to the deep pit and the perilous flame. All this in aid of a young man who, for all his wailing about school and friendship, would’ve tried to pull the same gag on any one of the Drones in attendance, if given the chance. I told them how he was doing all of this merely to get out of doing something a few pounds would fix, if only he’d apply them. I told them how he hung the very girl _I_ was keen on in front of me like a bally carrot on a stick, and how I was helpless to agree to whatever scheme was proposed after that, for losing Bobbie would mean losing a great deal of stock in future happiness. With a few animated hand gestures and sharp words of rebuke in the direction of certain rodents and manservants, my audience was spellbound.

They readily sympathized with me, of course: Soon all were cursing the name of Mousey and bemoaning the fate left to poor Bertram. The right turn of phrase can do that. Why, Barmy even stood me a drink; I would have imagined that it would take greater measures to induce such an appropriate response. A steady stream of Drones slapped me on the back and proclaimed me the most upstanding of gentleman for having agreed to do something so bally awful to save the skin of Mousey Mottershead.

A young bounder by the name of Tuppy Glossop came to join the mourners after some time; I welcomed him as one welcomes a friend and brother despite his previous slights against me. He was full steam ahead with the condemnation of Mousey, anyhow, which had to be admired in a man, even if this selfsame Glossop _had_ forced me to replace a full set of evening attire one fateful evening.

“What I don’t understand is how it all came about,” he said to me earnestly, over a piece of cook’s best steak-and-kidney pie.

“Oh, you know how it is, Tuppy. A chap can be easily won over, you went to school with this chap; you sidle up to him for a favor in closing whatever deal you want closed. _You’ve_ done it to me before, you know,” I reminded him with only the barest hint of sourness. Tuppy shook his fair-haired head and regarded me as he would a class-A chump.

“That’s not what I mean, you chump. What I mean is, how did this all get put past Jeeves in the first place? You didn’t not _tell_ him, did you?” It was my turn to look on _him_ as a chump. The young Glossop knew the cursory facts of the matter, yes—namely, the difficulty with a former schoolmate who would use his fellow’s love against him—but not the details. Details that revealed, perhaps, the most stinging part of the whole affair.

“My dear Tuppy, this ‘Jeeves’ you speak of was the very man who suggested the half-brained scheme that’ll be landing him and young Bertram in the gutter for who knows how long.” There was camaraderie in the stony silence we shared. Tuppy, at least, had more sense of duty than anyone else I knew at the time. “Mousey lapped it up, of course—you know how impressionable these young chaps are—and was on it without a thought of the fate of his fellow man.”

Tuppy looked surprised. Surprised as the moment before he was socked in the eye by an irate opera singer (I imagine—I wasn’t party to the event). I couldn’t blame him. I, too, was surprised when I found that Jeeves, the man who I had trusted to chart this Wooster’s course for several years, had been the one to kick the stool out from under him.

“But… why?” I shrugged at him. He gazed meditatively his pie. “I wouldn’t have thought Jeeves would want to leave your flat. It’s a dashed cozy place. And what with Jeeves getting everything he wants in your employ—”

“Now, now, Tuppy! Jeeves doesn’t _always_ control what happens in the Wooster household. Many a time I have been chilled steel in the presence. There was an incident only last month when I—”

“Oh, come off it, Wooster. You know you’d never survive in polite society alone anymore since Jeeves started handling your affairs,” he said, smirking. The fraternal warmth between self and the Glossop was beginning to wane. Still… there was some truth in what he said. When I still employed my previous valet, an older chap by the name of Meadowes, I was put so much off my feed by his sock-pinching and foot-stomping that I was a wreck of a man, within and without.

The Glossop blighter gave me a knowing look and returned to his pie. “Well, I do wish you the best of luck making it down there. I’ve heard fantastic things about the East End. Plenty of murders and raids on houses of ill-repute to keep you entertained, I’m sure.” I didn’t like this turn to amusement of my expense. This Glossop was meant to be following in the solemn footsteps of his fellow Drones, weeping softly and praying for the safe return of B. Wooster from the depths of Hell. Not making cheap jokes as he filled his face.

I’d soon had my fill of this jocular attitude towards crises and saw fit to leave the club. Most everyone had turned in or drifted over to some lighter-hearted venue by that time, anyhow.

“Yes…. Well, good-bye, then, Tuppy. We shall meet at Philippi, no doubt.” I meant it to sting. Tuppy seemed not to have noticed, engrossed anew in the plate of sustenance before him. He simply mumbled a parting word and resumed his shoveling.

Thus, I left the Drones to a small chorus of well-wishes and hopes to see me soon; there was some loyalty in the place yet. Those well-wishes kept me in slightly higher spirits as I found a cab and bid it homeward; I was glad for them as I recalled the somber face of the valet I’d left there. This lachrymose attitude that had taken hold of Jeeves made the prospect of moving all the worse. The man could have at least tried to cheer the Wooster household now that he’d bid us move to the worst part of London.

But, no. There he was, even as I returned from the Drones, looking more somber than I’d ever seen the man before. I sighed as he removed my jacket and refused to meet my eyes.

“You know, Jeeves, you might at least _try_ to lay off this maudlin bit,” I told him frankly as I handed him my hat and gloves. When he turned back around, the impassive face of the valet had quietly slipped back into place. It was a subtle difference, really, but apparent to those of us who’ve had to live close to a stoic of Jeeves’ caliber. Why, I wouldn’t doubt my ability to decipher even old Zeno’s face at this point.

“Sir?”            

Now, after I’d first hired Jeeves, I may well have fallen into the trap of doubting myself. Thinking that, perhaps, I’d imagined the emotion that had been so subtlely present on my valet’s face. It was easy enough to do, particularly when one was used to the over-animation of my fellows at places like the Drones. And when Jeeveses met one with so bland a response as a simple ‘sir?’. But, as I say, we had been side-by-side for too long. It was useless for Jeeves to try working his ‘I don’t know what you mean, sir’ tactics on me any longer; he was obvious to the trained Wooster eye.

“Jeeves, I will speak plainly with you.” I drew myself up to my full height and looked him right in the eye. I daresay Jeeves had the same tactic going. It was a good one for dealing with unpleasantness between two men of iron will. Drinks at the Drones helped with such matters, too. “You’ve been acting like a dying duck in a thunderstorm ever since Mousey left the flat. And for what? Your scheme was accepted with hearty approval; we’re off to Soho as soon as you find a place for us; I’m sure you have plenty of ideas for impressing Mousey’s aunt that I’ve yet to be apprised of. There’s no need for this somnolent attitude you’ve taken on.”

“I think, perhaps, you mean ‘somber,’ sir.”

“Never mind that, Jeeves! My vocabulary is irrelevant at the moment.”

“A gentleman’s vocabulary is never irrelevant, sir. The Bard once noted—”

“Jeeves!”

Again, that strange, reserved quality passed into my man’s manner, and he directed his gaze over the young master’s left shoulder.

“I’m sorry, sir. Pray, continue.”

“I was trying to _ask_ you, Jeeves, what all this fuss is about with the scheme. We’ve got to go through with it now. Mousey’s signed on the dotted line.” I wondered if, perhaps, he’d finally come to see what a gross tureen he’d dumped us into and had started to feel some regret. “You don’t want to back out _now,_ do you? Well, I’m sorry, Jeeves, but it’s all been settled. It’s a frightful shame, but there it is. I can’t go saying ‘no’ to the young scoundrel now; why, he’s probably already got his aunt on the line, telling her all about his poor charge and all that he’s done to improve his life. Not to mention the sitch with Miss Wickham.”

I couldn’t… divine? Decipher? The look that followed on Jeeves’ map. Yes, it’s true that I was very recently extolling the Wooster abilities when it comes to reading Jeeves, but there are moments when even _my_ powers fail: Here, it is when the expression is one that I’ve hardly seen before on a Jeeves or anyone else. It was a strange look. Almost pensive, almost sad; almost bemused. In short, a look that contained so many things I couldn’t figure which was the dominant one. His words didn’t help, either:

“I apologize, sir. You’re quite right; there is no possibility of reversing what has been done with Mister Mottershead. Do you require a cocktail before bed, sir? Or shall I lay out our grey silk pajamas for the evening?”

All I could tell was that he was prevar—prover—avoiding the matter at hand. I couldn’t say why; he’d _suggested_ the bally scheme, after all. Jeeves had never been one to resist putting out a plan that would be sure to provide returns for himself (and, much of the time, for the young master as well,) so I imagined there was something deeper to all this that I couldn’t grasp. Normally, it would run as follows without fail: Jeeves would suggest a wheeze, I would kick; Jeeves would be firm about his particular solution to the matter; I would eventually discover that I, too, had wanted things to go as he’d planned them from the start. We’d rarely stepped off that path in all the time I’d employed him.

And yet, here he was, not a few hours after putting forward a particularly sordid solution to Mousey’s dilemma, refusing to answer even the plainest of questions about the matter, looking like a kicked dog and trying to deter me from thinking about it all by offers of cocktails and bedroom wear.

“Set out the pajamas, Jeeves. I will dress myself this evening,” I said airily. I wanted him to know, at the very least, that this despondency wasn’t welcome. The man might at least _attempt_ buoying the master’s spirits by showing confidence in his plan. Jeeves had, to that point, done anything but. He made it seem as though he’d signed the death warrant and was now sadly walking by my side to the gallows. Not the most inspiring attitude.

I was ‘very good, sir’-ed and left to my own devices. These devices led me to flinging myself onto the settee and picking up the nearest book. Thinking it was one of my Rex West novels—it was stuffed in-between the cushions of my settee, after all, something I’ll often do if I don’t have a mind to use the bookshelf—I opened it eagerly, but quickly found myself face-to-face with the kind of philosophical garbage that only creatures like Jeeves and Lady Florence Craye can bear. Scanning the thing gave me something about the ‘war among the members’ and the ‘duplicity of life’ and other such rot.

 I doffed the thing with haste and decided that a stiff drink was a much better choice for the weary mind. In this Wooster’s opinion, Jeeves’ philosophy could go hang if it couldn’t save him from the piteous state he’d fallen into that day. I was always under the impression that philosophy was supposed to guide one down a certain path of action and understanding in life that would lead to some kind of happiness, somehow, and it seemed to me that Jeeves had lost all of his when I’d chided him about Mousey. What good, then, was reading other men’s ideas about the nature of existence?

“Do you require anything else for the evening, sir?” A voice floated from my bedroom doorway.             After stabilizing my brandy and my heart, I looked up at the recently-appeared Jeeves. The valet face was impassive again. Well, if he wasn’t going to even _try_ having better cheer about the business with Mousey, I really had no more to say to the man.

“No, that will be all, Jeeves.”

“Good-night, sir.”

I let him drift off without a reply. Even with my dose of philosophy for the evening, I couldn’t imagine what could possibly be ‘good’ about the night and days to come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Workin' hard on this thing. I wish it came easier; I've had this idea in mind for some time (years, in fact,) but still don't feel like it's very good. I'm trying, though, and hope that you guys continue to enjoy it, even through my attempts at Bertie-voice and possible weirdosity in chapters to come. The support is much appreciated!! <3


	4. Dies Irae

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bertie finally finds his way to his dismal East End living quarters.

Every hour following my funeral at the Drones crawled, snail-like, along. I will be frank: For all the Wooster courage, for all the spirit of the Woosters at Agincourt that ran through my veins, I dug in the heels against preparations for leaving my beautiful flat. It turned everything from a horrible thing that was _going_ to happen to a horrible thing that was _happening._ I didn’t care for it.

After a few days of lamentation, I received a telegram from Mousey. It read as follows:

WOOSTER (stop) WHERE ARE YOU (stop) MUST BE SENT ADDRESS TO SEND TO AUNT MILLICENT (stop) YOU PROMISED REMEMBER BOBBIE (stop)

There are times when, despite the knowledge of the psychology of the individual I’ve absorbed from Jeeves, I’m really surprised by others. Like Mousey, at this juncture. One would think that the young rascal would refrain from twisting the knife, from giving tongue to such airy words about Bobbie, for the sake of good repute. Were I in the same sitch, I wouldn’t remind a friend about the gun I was holding to his head. Then again, this Wooster’s code is too strong to ever stoop to blackmail, so I suppose the point is moot.

Anyhow, I was read this telegram. I was read this telegram by Jeeves, and Jeeves, over the past few days, had failed to improve in the morale department. The stern words I’d had with him failed to take effect. Jeeves remained the perfect valet, of course—every surface shined and every article of clothing was pressed to perfection and so forth—but that awful _thingness_ remained. It made me want to shake him until he snapped out of it. But, of course, one doesn’t shake a Jeeves. Thus, I merely continued on expressing my displeasure with him as I saw opportunity. Something had to work at _some_ point. Then again, I’d never been in the presence of a defunct Jeeves before, so what did _I_ know?

I drew a hand over wearied eyes and gazed at Jeeves from my chair as he finished reading. “You know what this means, Jeeves?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We shall have to arrange an address… posthaste.”

“Very good, sir. I have, in fact, already secured us a flat.”

Now, you see, Jeeves had made quiet arrangements like this many times before; the majority of these could be chalked up to ensuring that he and his master could flee into foreign lands to escape the full-moon sacrifices of Aunt Agatha. I had always relied on his invisible movements to keep the Wooster affairs in order. But something about him doing it on _this_ occasion rankled; it was as though he had no difficulty in setting a date and time for the torture of one B. Wooster.

“Well… where is it?” I’d almost thanked him for the service as a matter of form, but quickly thought better of it. I’d recently told Tuppy Glossop I could be chilled steel in the presence of Jeeves; it was high time I proved it. And, as I was stuck in a foul mood, I didn’t hesitate to add, “You might’ve consulted me first. The place must be perfectly horrid.”

A pause. These had become strangely routine in the Wooster household of late. “Not at all, if I may say so, sir. The flat is located on Peter Street. It is somewhat old, and was once abandoned; however, prior to its abandonment, sir, it appears to have been a pleasant place relative to its fellows. The building boasts—”

“Oh, never mind, Jeeves. No matter how you slice it, a Hellhole is always a Hellhole.” I confess I was determined to remain angry. What features of an East End slum could possibly capture my attention when I was leaving my _home?_ No more lovely views over Berkeley Square, no more fine walks through the clean air to the flower seller on the corner; no more jolly tunes on the piano to brighten a rainy day. And all that was failing to mention the lacings of betrayal on all sides. I had a right to be sour. “When shall the firing squad be summoned?”

“I’ve arranged for us to move tomorrow afternoon, sir. If I might say, sir, there are still tasks that need be completed.” I cast a venomous gaze in my man’s direction. What right had _he_ to go about adding further misery to my life? If nothing else, it was terribly unsporting.

“Get on with it, then,” I sighed, kneading the temples.

“Well, sir, I’ve arranged for the flat under a pseudonym of my own. I thought, perhaps, sir, you would like to do the same, that you might be inconspicuous while we’re living away.” I begrudgingly admitted that it was something I should be considering.

“My surplus name for the constabulary has always been ‘Ephraim Gadsby’… what of that?”

“I think, sir, perhaps it would be prudent to find a more commonplace name. In order that the scheme should be leant verisimilitude, sir, it is my opinion that we must provide a homogenous image for her ladyship. Nothing must be seen to suggest something out of place.”

I sighed. Jeeves _could_ simply go along with my suggestions and give the pretense that he still cared about the young master’s opinions. But, no. Everything, as always, had to be met with some sort of question. The young master was worth nothing as long as the brains of a Jeeves were close at hand.

“Fine, fine… perhaps… Spencer?” Similar to my Aunt Agatha’s old moniker, but I know I’d also heard it searching for the correct address among East Dulwich addresses once upon a time.

“A fine choice, sir.” I paused. It really seemed to me that Jeeves was scoring off of me with every word he said, just then. What with all his strange attitudes and his betrayal and the fact that we were shortly to be leaving for dingier pastures, I couldn’t be sure of anything that Jeeves was implying in those days.

 “Yes….” I fell quiet, mulling the first name over. There were only so many common names one could choose from, and only so many of them that I could imagine being called. “Charlie Spencer? Is that suitable?”

“Perfectly suitable, sir.”

“Fine.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Fine.”

“Will that be all, sir?”

“Fine. I mean to say, yes. Carry on, Jeeves.”

Frankly, I was inclined to think that Jeeves had something against me, but I really couldn’t say what it was. The Wooster frame hadn’t seen any inappropriate articles of clothing in the last couple weeks, I’d not spoken out against any scheme (until this one with Mousey, anyhow); I’d not denied him travel to any exotic locale that he had been lusting for. _He’d_ been the one to condemn us to a place which would make life near on impossible.

Again, I found myself chasing my tail in the matter of manservants. It made my head ache. Or, rather, made it ache a touch more than it had been already. I finally decided not to think about Jeeves for some time. How could I hope to deal both with Jeevesian affairs _and_ my own? I had Jeeves _to_ help manage my own affairs, after all.

Thus, I rather shut down until it was time to trudge over to the East End. Jeeves insisted that I dress down and we hire a cheap cab to the flat. It pained him, I could tell, to allow me out with a cloth hat and no waistcoat or jacket. I’d have previously thought that sending me out into the world like that would end the man (particularly given his behavior when Rocky Todd unwittingly gave report of a poet’s atrocious dressing habits.) But he let me go, pouring me into the smoky interior of a cheap car and sending me off to the address.

2305 Peter Street. Number two. I found myself looking up at the unhappy façade of the building as we approached and felt my fate more than ever before. It was a soot-covered place with three floors of chipped bricks and miniscule windows looking out onto the barren street. I gave a knock at the front door and, after a minute or two, a woman appeared before me in the doorway.

I say a ‘woman’—I don’t do the sight justice. This woman appeared to have been waiting since the dawn of time to open the door for me. I don’t know that I’d ever seen a person of over one-hundred before, but I was certain that I was then: She leaned heavily on the door and held a thick walking-stick in the other. She was in possession of thin, white hair; a pair of dark eyes magnified by thick spectacles blinked rapidly at me; she was one of those old women who has taken to walking with such a stoop that they seem to stand at half my height or less.

Yet, for all this, she recognized me quickly enough.

“Ah! The new tenant. Missus Grayson, at your service. Go on through, Mister Spencer,” she cried, with enough richness in her timbre that I imagine she could’ve rivalled my Aunt Dahlia in her time. My landlady stood back from the door and let me in to a little entryway, in which she had a moldy register that might have been discovered at Rosetta. A sizeable cloud of dust emerged when she opened it, and she turned it around to me with a wizened, toothless grin. “I’ve been expecting you.”

I admit I was taken aback a bit. Jeeves had registered the flat _before_ I’d given my name. I suppose that he might have given it to the landlady after we’d agreed on a name, but wouldn’t things have been suspect if he had to _find_ his employer’s name?

“Are you quite well, lad?” My hostess asked me. I fancy there was a little real concern in her voice. No wonder, I suppose, as her new tenant was staring down at her register with no move to sign his name.

“Ah, well… first time here, and all that,” I murmured, taking up a pencil. She nodded.

“Just as you say. It’s a lovely place,” she told me cheerily. I had trouble believing it, and it must have shown up on the Wooster dial, for my hostess let out one of the gay and cheerful ones in reply. “It _is!_ Finer than any other you’d find around here. It’s only that… well....”

She paused, and impatience took over for a moment. After Jeeves’ refusal to tell me a clear thing, I wasn’t having any more prevara-whatsit-ing. “What is it? Is the place infested with vermin? Do meetings of the local gang happen there every Tuesday? What?”

“Oh, nothing of the kind, lad!” She was quick to correct me, and seemed to decide on spilling the beans. “It’s only that… people like to call that place haunted, you see. Some shady business happened there back in the eighties. But it’s all been sorted for so long, and I’ve never had a single problem with the flat itself in all my years here. Trust me, my boy, you’re getting this place for nothing, and it’s really very charming. Go on upstairs!” Mrs. Grayson pushed an oily key into my hand and gave me a hearty shove towards a staircase up the center of the parlor.

_So_ , I mused, mounting the creaky stairs, _I’m to be sharing the flat with ghosts._ I could’ve described my recent life with Jeeves as the same, so I supposed that it couldn’t be so terrible. Besides, ghosts hadn’t really shaken me for a time. Never, since all the phantoms I’ve ever known ended up being friends hiding under beds or locked in wardrobes as they escaped various assailants.

Everything Jeeves and Mrs. Gray had said seemed to be true: It all looked rather solid and—dare I say— even a little stylish. Covered in dust, yes, but there was no obvious damage to the place. The hearth was fairly big and topped with some species of handsome dark granite, there were some pieces of furniture that held up under sitting inspection; after running my shoe through the dust, the floor revealed itself to be a rich, shining wood. There was even a sensible bit of art on the sitting-room wall. The place was fairly small, though. I’d have thought it was fit for only one by the looks of it. But, as always, I’d thrown my affairs into Jeevesian hands; I had to assume he knew what he was on about in taking the place.

There was something about being in the flat alone, however. One heard sounds. One forgot if it was one’s own hand that brushed the dust away from that part of the mantle. One entered the pantry and discovered an array of strange stains on the floor and the counters. Glass crunched beneath one’s feet in spots, and there was a lingering smell in the air. Something sharp; something that made one screw up the nose and squint the eyes.

I was investigating for only a short while when I began to hear a wheezing, creaking sort of noise from somewhere behind me. It didn’t seem to come from the stairs or the floor as I walked, and it persisted for minutes. The little word my landlady had had with me about haunting trickled through the brain, and, before I knew it, I had taken up the nearest poker and crouched down beside the front door. If I couldn’t live in this flat, I could, at least, hope to survive it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I imagine that the address I named isn't even an address. If it is, I'm sorry. If Peter Street never had apartments on it or something of that nature, I apologize. I just wanted to use a real street name, but didn't really want to look so far into it that I discovered actual addresses and so forth... that's really my whole excuse.
> 
> Hope that you enjoy this chapter! (I admit to feeling rather uneasy about the quality of this one. Am hoping to get more excitement in next time.)


	5. Snared

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bertie learns that he's truly doomed to the East End, and the source of the flat's hauntings....

It was Jeeves. He had entered behind me with suitcases via a back stair. I was on him in a moment (after dropping the poker, of course; one must be civil.) I really understood nothing, still.

“Jeeves!” I paused to take in the man. He hadn’t even changed his appearance. Odder and odder. “What is going _on_ here? How did Mrs. Gray know my false name? What are we _doing?”_

“I am acquainted with Mrs. Grayson, sir.”

“Yes, but… wait, did you say that you _know_ this Mrs. Grayson?”  Had been betrayed yet again. I’d have thought, what with the apologies and the silences and of late, Jeeves might have given up his underhanded ways.

“Yes, sir. I have met the lady through her grandson, a Mister Herbert Grayson.”

“Then why all the fancy dress and false names?”

“That no-one may know of the subterfuge. Missus Greyson, though an affable woman, would not be the first to trust with this information. I’ve told her that we are a pair of friends, sir, and that we have been forced to live here for an interim period, in which we are receiving some assistance from Mister Mottershead.”

Now, this was a novel concept. I wasn’t sure that I cared for it. Jeeves as my ‘friend?’ I mean to say, I trusted the man, and had long considered him my closest confidante. If I’d thought about it, I’d have likely considered him a friend, too, of a sort. But our valet-master relationship had seen some strain of late. To be told that I was living with him now simply because we were great friends seemed a touch… off. What did Jeeves and I have in common, anyhow? Jeeves was all Great Russian authors and ancient philosophers; I was all Rex West and mysteries. I’d glimpsed the man having a beer at a pub once, and even then he could hardly have been called ‘chummy.’

But what could I say? It made more sense than Jeeves remaining my valet while I was supposed to be something like a pauper in the East End. I only hoped that I wouldn’t be expected to put up the act in front of guests.

“Well… it follows,” I admitted. “But how shall we live here? The place seems awfully small.” Jeeves inclined his head (still bulging in the back, I was relieved to note) and took up my bags.

“If you will follow me, sir.” I followed Jeeves into a small bedroom dominated by a large bed, perhaps even larger than the one in my flat. The mind tripped into the strangest places on entering the room. It made a confused and all-together too-far skip, and I found myself sputtering out,

“Jeeves… Well, you see, I… I understand throwing myself into the spirit of the East End lifestyle, but sharing beds seems a step beyond the comfort of one B. Wooster. Perhaps we should be reconsidering this scheme of yours.” Jeeves paused for a moment in his organization of the Wooster underthings, but didn’t turn around as he responded.

“There is no need to worry, sir. I’ve borrowed a cot from Mrs. Grayson, sir; I will be setting it up in the pantry.”

Now, I admit, the blood rose into the Wooster face with such speed that I’m still surprised I didn’t take a leaf from Madeline Bassett’s book and swoon from the strength of emotion I was suffering. But I didn’t. I simply remained there like some particularly abashed species of sloth until I could find the words with which to respond.

“Well… yes, naturally, Jeeves. I merely meant to say that… I…” The few words I found on the subject weren’t nearly enough, so I chased the tail of another topic. “The pantry, eh? I was looking around there for some time before. Jolly rotten place. There’s a terrible pong. You might want to consider putting in a window before making any attempts at sleep.”

“I will bear that in mind, sir.” He’d finished with the clothes and had turned back around. I gather that he observed my burning face, but he seemed to pay it no mind. “Will there be anything else, sir?”

I dismissed my manservant and collapsed onto my gargantuan bed. There was much to think about. Bearing this place was already turning out to be trying on the nerves. Barely any space at all, and what there was taken up by brooding Jeeveses. I had no idea what was expected in this world, how to be one of those young men with London accents who lived off of boiled potatoes and penny theatres. I’d never been anything but plain old B. Wooster, the well-dressed gentleman….

When I opened my eyes again, I found myself significantly farther away from my ceiling than I’d been previously. I extricated myself from it, shocked, and a shadow of a shiver ran down my spine. Now, I’m not generally afraid of beds, as a rule. We Woosters are made of stern stuff.  But _this_ bed seemed to have swallowed me up the moment I put my weight on it. The flat was trying to imprison me with the ghosts, and I’d not yet been there an hour…. (Granted, the noises had been proven to be less-than-otherworldly, but the place still left me uneasy.)

I wandered back out to the living room and lit a nervous cigarette. It was like being in a bally foreign land, this place. I mean to say, it wasn’t especially terrible, compared with some friends’ apartments. Particularly the aspiring writers. (Writers, as a rule, tend towards the seedier parts of the city. It provides them with the character studies necessary to the job, I’ve been given to believe.) But this was no casual visit to a friend—this was meant to be my _home!_

I cast a critical eye over the living room. There was nothing of interest. Nothing comfortable. I couldn’t begin to see myself falling into the thin-cushioned couch and finishing _The Mystery of the Pink Crayfish_ or any other such improving material. There were no bookshelves at all. No tables, no rug, and, of course, no piano. The room consisted solely of the hearth—with only an ancient Victorian sort of lamp on top—and the sofa. I daresay any self-respecting Spartan would have been happy there. There was the picture on the wall, I suppose, but its dull colors hardly raised the spirits of the room at large.

Jeeves had already started on clearing the undoubted pounds of dust off of the flat surfaces. In the spirit of our newfound ‘friendship,’ I spoke to him, affecting a fraternal tone of voice.

“So… Mrs. Grayson tells me that there was some rummy business conducted here in the eighties?”              
  
“Yes, sir. The gentleman who lived here before us committed suicide some months after taking the apartment.”

Well, I’d be blowed! I didn’t expect anyone to be quite so bare-faced about that sort of thing. Whispers and euphemisms were generally the order of the hour, to my mind, when one had to speak about death in any way. Why, I recall the death of my parents was only revealed to me after a great deal of plying with trifle and ice cream. (But, then again, that may have been due to the fact that I was barely old enough to tie my own shoes at the time.) I ‘I say’-ed and goggled for a few moments; after a contemplative drag on the cigarette, I found my voice once more.

“Do you know… _why_ he offed himself?”

“I’m afraid that I’m not acquainted with such intimate details of the case, sir. I only know that the gentleman had ties with scientific circles of London. His valet mentioned it briefly in the Ganymede Club Book.”

Now, right from the first, I didn’t believe that Jeeves was being entirely truthful with me about being unacquainted with details. In my experience, Jeeves is courting the details of a case before one has even recognized them oneself. But I didn’t like to push the matter. It was disturbing enough to know that the man who’d lived there just before us had found some reason to shuffle off this mortal coil; I wasn’t really prepared for any tragic tales or visions of gore.

“Yes, well… I think I need a bit of a breather, Jeeves,” I sighed, flicking away the butt of my cigarette into a disused rubbish bin.

“Yes, sir. I wondered if you might not prefer to go out while the flat is being cleaned. It might be best to arrange for your dinner out, as well, sir; I fear that, on inspection, the appliances may not be reliable as I was informed they would be.” I agreed with Jeeves on all points and, after throwing on my overcoat, dashed off to the Drones.

Now, I’d told myself on leaving the flat that morning that I was swearing off the Drones for the duration of my time in the East End. But the afternoon brought second thoughts, and, not half an hour after encountering my new lodgings, I was lamenting over a whisky and soda at the familiar bar, hiding the shabby costume under my fine overcoat (one has to have some appearance of respectability at the Drones, after all, even when one is pretending to be a pauper.)

I couldn’t imagine how I was to survive my new lodgings. Particularly since I’d broken down and had to flee from it before I’d passed even a day there. Clearly, all of the courage of the Woosters would be necessary for this venture. More than that, perhaps. After all, what good did a brave face before the terrors of the French army do if one had only a rat nest to look forward to following the fray?

The story I had to tell was much the same as the last time I’d darkened the doors of my club. The commiseration of my fellow club members was much the same. I admit that I was saddened by the fact. I had hoped that, at the last hour, someone, some upstanding young Drone with a strong jaw and bright, gleaming eyes might offer to take my place. I’d gladly have stayed around to hear his little speech about doing a far better whatsit than he’d ever done before. But I had no such luck. No greater sacrifice than an offer to buy me a drink was made that evening, and I was left toddling back to the flat around midnight with a heavy tread.

On arriving back at the flat, I found no Jeeves. I should say, for the benefit of the new readers among you, that it is customary for Jeeves to remove the hat and coat from the Wooster person on stepping beyond the threshold. One could do these things oneself, of course, but it was one of those little things that had simply been _done._ I didn’t like all these changes of late. One or two were tolerable. But the sheer number and magnitude that I’d experienced of late made the heart flutter and the stomach turn.

“Jeeves?” No answer was forthcoming. I began to remove my coat and hat myself and tossed them into a nearby closet; much to my surprise, the sound of clothing being mistreated failed to call forth my valet from the ether.  The unease spread to my whole frame and had me creeping into living room—clean, now, but shadowed and empty as ever—and looking around for a lamp. The lamp on the hearth was one of those old-fashioned oil-based contraptions. With unsteady hands, I dismantled it, extracted a match and struck it.

A shock of sound and light from across the room was close to the death of me. The match dropped from nerveless fingers as I beheld the starkly-shadowed form of my valet in the pantry door.

I will admit: I cried out. It seemed that I would have to attach some sort of bell to my valet, or else ask him to be a little more vocal about his presence. Otherwise these sudden manifestations would be the absolute end of me.

“Jeeves!” I heard the voice say, brokenly. This experience was coming far too often, particularly as it put such strain on the heart of one Wooster, B. I drew myself up to my full height and prepared to give Jeeves a juicy telling-off. “You really must cease this habit of yours—this appearing in doorways with no notice at all of the presence. You’re liable to give the young master silver hairs.”

“My apologies, sir. I found myself occupied when you arrived.”

Now, I’d normally let this sort of thing go. Even Jeeveses, with their all-seeing and perfect stewardship, deserve to be occupied from time to time. But the Jeeves I found who had been so occupied frightened me a little. I know what you must be saying: ‘Wooster, old chap,’ you’re saying to yourself, ‘Wooster old chap, perhaps you should consider a stay at some sort of restful home for a time. You jump at the merest of shadows, and, thrice now, you’ve suffered heart palpitations because of your own valet.’

Such you might say, and I, too, might say, if I didn’t know what Jeeves looked like just then. But, dear readers, I did. And I think that I would’ve been frightened by it whether or not I was nervous and just a little tipsy: My man was pale, cast in stark shadows by the lamp in his hand. I really can’t explain the worst of it, though. There was simply this… feeling, you see. This touch of fear that struck me through the heart.

“My apologies, sir,” Jeeves repeated (probably because the young master had done nothing but to goggle at him since the baby blues had reached his face.) His voice was the same low, melodious thing it ever was. And his face hadn’t _really_ changed—there were no contortions or wounds there that allowed me to point to a thing and say, ‘there, yes! _That’s_ the frightening thing in this valet’s face.’ I really have nothing to give you but my feelings, and I can’t make you believe my feelings are justified. But if you’re thinking that this Wooster should be carted off to the loony bin for all this, I’d advise you to toddle off to some other story or other. There are yet stranger things to come.

“N-no apologies necessary, old fruit,” I responded, in the firmest of voices. “Just… well… how were things about the flat in the young master’s absence?”

“Nothing much of note has occurred, sir. A telegram arrived for you from Mister Mottershead shortly after your departure.” Jeeves handed the thing over and I took it with hands that barely shook. We’d sent a message to Mousey with the address the evening before, and, frankly, I’d have thought that he’d give me a little respite before badgering me with telegrams. I clearly expected too much of the lad.

WOOSTER (stop) HAVE SENT ADDRESS TO AUNT (stop) WILL BE COMING ROUND TOMORROW LUNCH TIME TO ARRANGE STORY (stop)

 _“Tomorrow?”_ Not only was I to be set upon without a moment to breathe, but he expected a story as well. I mean to say, it made sense that Mousey and I should decide on a tale for my character. If he should call me a miller and I should call myself a weaver, for example, it might cause some confusion for the old relation. But _tomorrow?_ Mousey, it was rapidly becoming clear to me, had no sense of tact.

“Sir?” I looked up at the Jeeves at my elbow with a touch of incredulity. (We were standing quite close, you see, as his lamp was our only source of light.)

“You _know_ what this means, Jeeves: Tomorrow we will be infested with Mouseys, and shortly thereafter their abysmal relations will be pawing at the gates. I see no need for any _‘sir’_ -ing.”

“Just as you say, sir.”

“I don’t suppose one can bathe oneself in this place?” The cold sweat that decided to take up residence on the Wooster skin whenever I set foot in the flat was beginning to feel dashed uncomfortable.

Jeeves nodded and led me silently towards a door opposite the pantry. It opened to a small bathroom that followed the theme of the flat: old-fashioned but, by all appearances, serviceable.

I looked around for a source of light, eager to dismiss my valet. Now, I don’t mean to give the impression that I had a distaste for the man—as I’ve stated, even Jeeveses have the right to a slip-up every now and then, and I begrudged him nothing—but there was this slow, sharp dread that moved in my heart every moment I spent in the presence. Rather like when a nurse with an unsteady hand presses a needle into your arm _just so_ , and—well, you understand. The point is that I’d prefer if he left. I found the possibility of light in a pair of gas jets on the walls.

“Light those, will you, Jeeves?” I asked cheerily enough, starting the taps on a pleasant scalding temperature. Now, at this point, I might have started disrobing under normal circumstances. But the _just so_ -ness of Jeeves’ attitude left me uneasy, and, so, I stood around with no little awkwardness until he left me. The towels had already been set out, you see, so I’d nothing else to ask him for.

Once the pale lights had been lit and door had closed behind him, I tore off the outer crust and leapt into the water. The water wasn’t as scalding as I’d hoped, but it was relaxing enough. More so than anything else I’d experienced in the new flat. Soon, with a towel folded behind my head and resting on the rim of the tub, the eyes began to drift closed….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still pluggin' away at this thing. Having a bit of trouble, I must say. Feeling blocked. Finding out that this thing will be much longer than I once imagined if I follow the plot I want. Also think it might appear to be going nowhere. Bertie may or may not be a little too drift-y based on the fact that I made him drift off twice here....
> 
> Well, as always, comments are very much appreciated! =3


	6. Chilled

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The flat continues to send shivers down the Wooster spine, as does the behavior of a particular valet. Mousey and Bertie devise a plan of sorts.

All of this drifting wasn’t good for the Wooster constitution.

I mean to say, drifting is all well and good. One appreciates a good drift into a scene of mental nothingness every now and then, particularly when one is taxed to the point of being unable to move the limbs properly. But I quickly discovered that the new flat was no place for drifting.

There I was: resting the weary onion against the lip of the tub, willing all of my worries away, floating peaceably in the blackness just behind my eyelids. And I’d done sound work in the willing department, I’d wager: I could almost imagine myself in my own flat, in my own bath, getting ready to sleep in my own bed with my own Rex West novel to keep me company. Sadly, the thought eventually dawned I had to consider getting out—once the bathwater had gone cool and the digits wrinkled to the point of pain—and I was forced to crack open the baby blues.

My first thought was that, perhaps, I could get used to this place. Or, at least, this room. The dim lighting and damasked Victorianism lent to a pleasantly drowsy air. My eyes took to drifting—a new cornerstone of this Wooster’s existence—and fell upon the doorway. A fine doorway in many respects. Tall, hewn in some species of heavy, dark wood. But once the gaze focused a bit, I was shocked to discover that it was open. Having watched this selfsame tool for room division close behind my valet some hours beforehand, the shock was great—great enough to launch the Wooster corpus from its steeping water onto the floor and into a rough cloth towel in the space of moments.

I swore that I didn’t believe in ghosts or spirits or anything of the supernatural sort. I swore it as I gazed, saucer-eyed, at the door. I swore it as I heard a distinct creak in the room beyond and nearly suffered a fatal slip on the damp floor. I swore it as I crept on the moistened tips of my toes to the door and pushed it closed from an arm’s length. The towel did nothing to stop the shiver that ran through me. If anything, the towel made the situation worse—I think that it may have actually been made of nail clippings.

Why Jeeves would have supplied me with this wretched thing instead of a towel of my own, I couldn’t say. And, to be quite frank, it increased my wariness. Many little things could do that to one, particularly when all of these little things came from Jeeves, a being that calculated every act precisely. He meant whatever he was saying with the quietness and the towel and the refusal to meet me at the front door… I just didn’t know what it _was._

The trek across the sitting-room back to my bedroom was no easy feat. Jeeves had left a lamp burning on the mantle, so I had some idea of the make-up of the room, but the long shadows it threw on me and the sparse furniture made it all look like some kind of dark dream; like I was still sleeping in the bath and dreaming of creeping, unformed things. It took a moment for strength to come into my limbs to the point that they could jettison me across the room and into my dismal sleeping quarters once more.

I found my valet there, lit by another of those dreadfully dim lamps, folding my dressing-gown over the end of the bed. I would have said ‘as was his wont,’ but there was something so different about the way it was done in this place that it had nothing of the familiarity of our routine at home. I askewed—or perhaps eschewed—my heliotrope pyjamas and made for the wardrobe, from which I pulled a flannel shirt and a pair of heavy trousers.

“I’ve got to leave this place, Jeeves. Now. A moment longer will create lasting damage in the Wooster psyche.” Jeeves made no move at all to begin packing my things, and was infuriatingly silent. That is, until he wasn’t, and, at that point, he had only this to say:

“Most disturbing, sir.”

I’m often set off by this. When Jeeves seems to not care a whit for a man’s feelings and makes him feel invisible, I mean. Would it kill him to cry out ‘I say!’ or perhaps even ‘gadzooks!’ and express some manly sympathy for once in his life? All of this ‘most disturbing, sir’ business only served to make already-ground nerves ache anew in the best of circumstances. On _that_ evening, I was near to bopping him right in his already-crooked nose just to induce a human reaction.

“Jeeves, this is levels above ‘most disturbing.’ This is mind-boggling. Not to say downright eerie. I’ll hear no more ‘most disturbings.’”

“Very good, sir.”

I chose not to respond this time, and simply dropped the things I’d taken from the closet, begrudgingly clothing the frame with heliotrope pajamas instead. I did so in a haughty silence; however, I didn’t dismiss Jeeves either—I wanted so much to say _something_ more. To come up with some grand, profound statement that would make him feel as wretched as I did. However, as with Sisyphus and his boulder, it was useless in the end. All I succeeded in doing was creating an awkward moment when I turned around and saw Jeeves still waiting in my bedroom doorway.

“I will remain for Mousey to arrive tomorrow,” I conceded under the scrutiny of my valet’s gaze. “But I can’t guarantee that the scheme will live beyond that engagement.”

“Very good, sir. Will there be anything else, sir?”

A large brandy would have been welcome, but my spirit had been trodden down so that I hadn’t the heart to ask. I didn’t even know if we had such luxuries available in our new lodgings. “No, that will be all, Jeeves. Good-night.”

“Good-night, sir.”

Jeeves floated out, and I was left to my thoughts once more as I slipped into the nightwear. I don’t consider myself a man of deep thought, generally. When I’d tried it in the past, the results were generally confined to headaches or unintended naps. But the case at hand was one that had the mind buzzing with the indignity of it all, especially from the episode of the bathroom door.

You see, _I_ had had occasion to do things by stealth before. Stealing an 18 th-century silver cow-creamer, for instance. Creeping into an American country house to take back a cheque. Why, I was doing such things in my school days, unto sneaking into the Ancient Upjohn’s office to steal a biscuit or two. I did these things time and time again, usually with utterly selfless intentions. But it is always the Wooster fate, it seems, to be caught and thrown in chokey or otherwise humiliated in these ventures. (The Upjohn incident ended in a late-night lecture and six of the best with a willow switch. Not the most dignified affair of mine.)

This isn’t my point, however; it is, instead, a nagging question: Why should I live in a universe in which sweet-toothed young Woosters have Upjohns casually sitting in their offices in wait for them, but malevolent spirits should be allowed to spy on him without so much as a ‘how-do-you-do?’ It seemed jolly rude of the universe. I’m not a pessimist by nature (contrary the opinion of certain fish-faced newt-fanciers,) but, lying in the huge, sinking bed, staring up at the ceiling and inhaling the lingering Victorian mold, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d been wrung out.

On waking the following morning, I felt quite like the opening of my eyes had summoned the dawn. I mean to say, one moment I was contemplating my sad existence; the next, there was light struggling to break through my greasy window and Jeeves bidding me a ‘good-morning.’

“You continue to insist, Jeeves,” I began, with as much chagrin as I could manage while yawning, “that these _are_ ‘good mornings _._ ’ What about this scheme is good? What kind of morning is it in _this_ place, in which daylight fears to tread?”

Jeeves had shimmered over to the window and opened the curtains by this point, lighting the room only a touch more, and looked without. Perhaps he saw my point, for he replied,

“I will see about cleaning the windows from the outside, sir. In the meantime, I have prepared a small repast for you in the drawing room.”

“The _drawing room,_ Jeeves?” I laughed, derisively. “I think, perhaps, you are under the impression that we are still in our own flat, Jeeves. There is no _‘drawing room’_ in this hideous place. There is a _large_ awful room, and there are several _small_ awful rooms that have grown out of it. Like… what are those things, Jeeves? Those unnecessary bits of flesh?”

“Tumors, sir,” Jeeves responded, leading me over to the sofa. A low tea-table had been placed before it, making the room look almost civilized. Adding to this effect was a plate of eggs and bacon and tea steaming out of a ceramic mug. Without any thought for my own dignity, I threw myself onto the limp-cushioned sofa and drank a mouthful of warm, sweet _aqua_ -whatsit. Breakfast was as hearty as ever it was, despite my rough surroundings. At least Jeeves hadn’t yet lost his form with respect to eggs and b.

I thanked him for this, but he seemed to have swept out of the room without my noticing. I’d never thought of this habit of Jeeves’ as ‘sinister’ before, but… the thought occurred to me as I chewed a slice of egg-drenched bacon. Men—particularly men of Jeeves’ stature and Machiavellian wiles—shouldn’t be allowed to appear and disappear at will. The rest of us would never feel safe again.

I watched the spot that I’d last seen Jeeves, as if it might reveal to me how he had gone, when, out of the blue, there was a sharp rapping noise that shook me out of my thoughts. I called out to this selfsame vanished valet to answer the door, but no Jeeveses were forthcoming, and the rapping only intensified. Given the timbre and speed of the knocks, I shouldn’t have been surprised that Mousey Mottershead stood without. But I was.

“Bertie!” He cried much too cheerfully over my own hollow groan. “Wonderful to see you! Wonderful to—er—be here.”

“Is a man to have no peace at all, young Mousey?” I rounded on him. “Is a man supposed to open himself up to abuse at all hours simply because he has landed himself in East London? What happened to your telegram? What happened to the talk of ‘lunchtime’?”

“Oh, well… I’ve had word from Aunt Millicent this morning,” Mousey said easily, stepping inside and taking in the monotone scenery. His face was still filled with too much jollity for my taste. “She plans to drop in _today,_ in the evening… she mentioned something about sandwiches….”

“You gibber, Mousey,” I said, coldly. I was in no mood for vague ramblings just then. Drifting back over to the threadbare sofa and my breakfast, I continued with no greater warmth: “Let us get straight to the point, then: What is it I need to do for this Aunt Millicent? What tricks will you have your dancing monkey perform for her?”

“You needn’t dance,” Mousey replied, without a trace of irony. “Just look and act like some sort of vagabond, that’s all. I imagined that all of this would be quite simple, what with your criminal past….”

“No ‘criminal’ thing this Wooster has done hasn’t been to aid a friend… or attain a policeman’s helmet.” I didn’t see how it mattered. I still hadn’t exactly mixed with people of the lower classes, unless one counted a conversation with the occasional valet or butler (but _they_ were a distinctive breed, and, I’m given to believe, nothing like your standard, roughened East-Ender.) “I imagined that a suitable story about my past would be enough. Telling her how I’d been dumped into an orphanage at a young age and never learned a thing in my life….”

“That’s the sort of thing!” He cried, clapping me on the shoulder. Mousey had taken a seat next to me on the sofa and helped himself to a piece of bacon off my plate. “Now where will you be working? Where will I have secured you a job?”

I reluctantly gave in to this conversation, as it seemed that Mousey wouldn’t be shifted, not even after I rebuked him soundly for usurping my breakfast. My fate was sealed when Jeeves appeared once more—with great fanfare, I might add, in the form of a door creaking open before him—and supplied the young blighter with his own mug of tea.

The old schoolmate and I eventually decided that I would be working in a rubber processing plant. These were, in his words, ‘all the rage’ among the working class, and it was the sort of faceless position that would garner no suspicion if my _nom de plume_ were thrown around in connection with the job. Mousey would have discovered the position through diligent research and planning, educated me in the ways of proper society that I’d been estranged from for years, pleaded with the foreman that I might look rough, but truly held a heart of g.; that sort of thing. I would wear my hair loose and adopt a posture unbefitting of a gentleman and top the coconut with a cloth cap and I would fit the part as well as I needed to for Aunt Millicent.

As my goodwill towards Mousey had run dry long ago (at the moment he’d mentioned blackmail, I think,) I was in no spirit to have him remain in my sphere. So, not half an hour later, I was gently shoving him in the direction of the front door and bidding him ‘good-bye’ out of a sense of gentlemanly decorum rather than any true wishes for his well-being. I was just steaming back breakfastward when Mousey opened the door again to squeak inside,

“Oh, I almost forgot: Bobbie may be tagging along with Aunt Millicent today. You might want to invest in a false moustache or something of the sort. Toodle-pip!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, I'm having trouble writing this. I WANT to finish it. I want to get it to a point of greater interest, to begin to reveal the idea that actually inspired me to want to write this. But I don't appear to be even close. I'll try to push it forward in the coming chapters. Hope that you guys don't mind that basically nothing has happened. Starting to feel a little like Marcel Proust (except a much worse writer.)
> 
> Thanks so much for reading this far! Reviews are always appreciated!


	7. Mystérieuse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bertie breaks out his cockney accent. The world stands by in horror.

Several moments of stunned silence following Mousey’s departure. Or perhaps I should say they were “pregnant.” Whatever the case, there was a certain feeling in the air; the thingummy that tells one, “look, self. Now is the time to act the part of the man or the Mouse in the face of trials. And it does not do for a man following the noble Code of the Woosters to follow the path of certain Drones who have recently left their company.” I didn’t want to stay. I’d not wanted to stay since a moment after my valet had informed me of the address and led me there, sharpish, in a horse-drawn carriage. Stepping in the door had been a monumental effort; sleeping had been so near to impossible that I’m still not convinced that I recorded any number of hours on that first evening.

However… I was again met with a problem. A dilemma. The sort of snare that catches the panting hart in its search for cooling streams and delivers it to the hunters’ hands.

You see, I had figured that, after this little chat with Mousey, I could oil out with no particular fault. I would request the quiet movements of my manservant in arranging the affair, and I would take my leave out of a convenient back entrance. The Code of the Woosters, rigid though it is, makes allowances for cruel and unusual treatment of its followers. And nothing could have been crueler or more unusual than taking an apartment in the East End and told to make do, as though one were living a normal life.

If I allowed Mousey to see me in the flat, and simply planned that his aunt should find it empty when she arrived… the odorous (onus? Onan?) was on him. His aunt would see no poor gentleman of the East End, flattened by life and dragged back into some semblance of society by clutching the noble sleeve of Algernon Mottershead. She would return to him with questions that he couldn’t answer, and Mousey would be forced—for once in his life—to face facts and the unbridled wrath of an angry aunt.

All of this spoke to the genius of my plan. There was no need to remain; we could be out and about in the better parts of London again hours before Aunt Millicent’s cab came trundling down the street, she would never see the face of B. Wooster, and he could continue to be, in the eyes of the general populace, nothing less than a fine young gentleman about town.

But _now_ … now, Bobbie was going to come. She was not only within hailing distance of young Mousey and his words of ruin, but she was going to see her good chum B.W.W. bowing to the will of her meagre spoonful of a cousin. I couldn’t make my escape, but I couldn’t allow her to see me, either.

“Jeeves,” I said in a breath, swaying a little on my feet, “I’m sunk.”

Without warning, still unsteady from the intensity of my despair, a bolt of inspiration struck me on the mazzard like a well-aimed objet d'art. I turned about-face with such speed that I made myself dizzy.

“Jeeves!” The man had appeared again to clear away the breakfast tray, and looked up at me with his usual air of stuffed-frog-ness. If the tenor of my voice refused to bring forth excitement, my words _had_ to hit the mark. “ _You_ could do it! You could present yourself to Lady Millicent, pretending to be the survivor of the East End, and Bobbie wouldn’t be any the wiser! Mousey would have no complaints, and all would once again be sunshine and roses in the A1 postal district. Brilliant, eh?”

The air of taxidermied amphibian didn’t shift. If anything, it became more pronounced as Jeeves straightened up with the disused breakfast tray balanced in one hand and empty mugs in the other.

“You will forgive me for pointing it out, sir,” he said, voice chilly as a whatsit in winter, “but it was not _I_ who volunteered to take on this role for Mister Mottershead.”

I frankly stared at him. You see, this Jeeves of mine has been known to bear a striking resemblance to Balaam’s Ass in the past, particularly in matters sartorial, and occasionally on the subject of ‘round-the-world cruises. But he is a helpful sort of chappie. Always jumps at the opportunity to help the poor young master out of the soup if he has the remotest chance of doing so. Why, I once found the man pacing around in his pantry, distraught (as much as a Jeeves can ever be) simply because he was unable to prize out a solution to a particularly sticky situation. Luckily, that particular case had resolved itself before his healing touch was required.

What was _this,_ then? I’d never known such treachery before. The only thing that had come close was the suggestion of the East End plan at the outset—and, then, he’d practically dissolved into tears of remorse!

“Jeeves.” I spoke his name with all the chilled steel I’d once assured Tuppy I had in my soul. “ _You_ were the very man who suggested this plan. _You_ were the man who offered to remove—revoke?—yes, revoke—the plan the moment it displeased the young master. Where is the chivalrous Jeeves of old? Where is the Jeeves who promised to do his utmost for the comfort of one Wooster, B.?”

The man ignored me supremely, placing the empty mugs on the tray and beginning to drift from the room. I followed. Tiny though it was, one could fit more than one ass in 2305 Peter Street, number two.

“Jeeves—”

“I am afraid that I shall necessarily be occupied this afternoon, sir.” He had turned around in the doorway, blocking my entry and even my view into the kitchen. Victorian doorways have always struck me as unnecessarily narrow, and Jeeves isn’t the smallest of chaps. “If you require assistance in disguising your appearance before Miss Wickham, you may consider the use of these.”

The man had extricated from some hidden place on his person a fair, faintly gingery strip of fluff, along with a worn cloth cap, and placed them in my hands. Before I could utter another word about them, he had disappeared behind the door, and I was loath to follow. Not to say that the kitchen was the servants’ sacred space—I can often be found chatting with my valet there while he is polishing the silver—but the finality of his gift made me pause on the threshold, though the choice words I had for him still burned at the back of my tongue.

I am not, I think, the most thoughtful of men. But something about the things in my hands made the mind begin ticking over. _This_ was my disguise. These were the things that were to transform the future Lord Yaxley into James—no… it was something else, something homelier… Charlie!—Spencer, youngest son of Frank the ditch-digger and Betty the barmaid, professional loafer and general ne’er-do-well. Application of the false moustache, the doff-able cap and the set of corduroy trousers stowed away in my quarters would have to be enough.

I wasn’t sure that I believed in the power of these things to transform me. At least, not if I presented myself to Bobbie, with whom I daresay I was quite intimate. I’d seen men of my acquaintance disguise themselves before—most notably, the time when my actor friend Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright appeared at the home of his estranged fiancée wearing a slightly larger false moustache over his real one—and had never once been fooled. Unless one counts the shoe polish-bedecked faces of Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps and his lot when they had formed a Minstrel troupe, but I need hardly say I wasn’t prepared to take the scheme to that end.

Then again, I had only before dealt with members of the Drones Club, and, so, their disguises were generally limited to something akin to the Potter-Pirbright mess above, or perhaps a wig or glasses. Never more than one element comprised their efforts. Not to mention the fact that they had been putting their disguises before the exceptionally penetrating gaze of Bertram Wooster. Perhaps the few things I had, put together with the loping, Fink-Nottle-esque gate I had been considering, would do the trick.

In the aftermath of the argument with Jeeves, my body decided to remind me of how little it had slept the night before. Seeing as I had nearly half the day until Mousey’s Aunt was due, I returned to my bedroom and fell into the sinking mattress with a sigh. Morpheus drew his obliterating black cloak over me (one of Jeeves’ gags) and I was asleep before I had the chance to register another thought.

I woke to an unexpected feeling of bliss. The room was quiet and warm; the blankets—brought from my own flat, naturally—were soft and warm and begged me to remain cocooned in them forever. The only sound was the gentle ticking of my pocket watch, which had made its way out of the pocket of my dressing-gown and migrated towards my ear during the unconscious hours. I could have easily been convinced, in those bleary moments between wakefulness and sleep, that the lark was on the wing, and, at a stretch, even the snail on the thorn.

On taking up the watch, however, I was jolted into a shocked sort of wakefulness, as if I’d had an infusion of coffee straight into the brachium. It was approaching seven in the evening—well beyond the time I would have pegged for the appearance of an aunt on the threshold—and it was none too light outside the windows.

As far as I could tell, for I heard no disgruntled voices (or, for that matter, voices of any level of gruntlement,) my guests had not yet arrived. I took advantage of these saving moments to throw on my less-than-gentlemanly clothes and facial _accoutrements._ It was lucky that the idle brain had chosen that hour in which to spring back into race-day form, because I had only just applied the disguise when there was a faint rapping on an outside door—doubtlessly the door to my flat.

My first instinct, as I’d yet to fully take on the attitude of the East-Ender, was to call for Jeeves to answer it. I managed to swallow the call before it escaped my throat (a near thing, as it happens) and headed to the door with my head held as high as I could manage, given the circs.

One would not be making presumptions in saying that I had certain expectations about this aunt. By all accounts—Mousey’s, primarily—she was similar in nature to my Aunt Agatha, only it was a different cause that had her raising her hackles and howling at the moon. Whereas my aunt was determined alternately to marry me off or to babysit her blasted son, this one went wild for service. Despite the streak of philanthropy, this aunt was still an aunt. It was the same blackness in the soul that drove them to trying to mold their unsuspecting nephews; it was the same fire that drove them to refuse contentment with their nests in the countryside and roam the land causing perturbation and despair. Thus, I answered the door with all the terror that precedes meeting a werewolf-turned-pugilist.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I found this aunt to be a specimen along the lines of an aged Madeline Bassett. She was small and slightly plump—opposed to the tall, slender, goddess-like proportions of La Bassett—but she had similarly huge, soppy blue eyes that were always a little wet at the corners, the same sighing voice, and the same sugar-coated fancy that makes the air around them clog one’s lungs with sweetness. (Or perhaps they wear the same perfume. I can’t be entirely sure.)

“Ah, Mister Spencer,” the woman breathed, fixing me with a sad gaze and a smile that made me feel like a poor insect on whose wing she had trodden. “Delightful to meet you at last. I am Lady Millicent. I believe that my nephew, Mister Algernon Mottershead, will have informed you of my plan to visit.”

I was a little slow to respond. Not because of the above-mentioned resemblance to an ex-fiancée, but rather the appearance of the filly behind her.

Somehow, the moment of meeting this aged Mottershead aunt had driven all thought of Bobbie from my mind until the moment she glided into view. And glide she did, on long, shapely legs toned by her many hours plying her trade on the tennis courts. This Bobbie, you see, is a pippin if ever there was one. She is not only tall and slim and pleasantly sculpted, but endowed with thick flame-colored curls, ruby lips and burning dark eyes. She also has the delightful habit of wearing dresses that wrap her snugly about the torso and cut off just above the knees of said l.s.l.’s. All this is not to mention her sharp profile and really corking ankles.

The lovely face, when it first swam into my field of vision, was a tabula rasa, as I’ve heard Jeeves put it. It suggested a girl who would much rather have been cutting up a dance floor than following an aged aunt around East London. When it turned to me, however, it erupted into a smile, and a delicate hand came to meet the ruby lips, stifling a laugh. I doffed my cap—it _was_ a little silly to be wearing it indoors—and put my best Cockney forward.

“Gree’in’s to ya, m’Lady.” I really should have run the accent by Jeeves before attempting it. Lady Millicent raised her eyebrows and the young squirt at her shoulder began giggling with abandon.  “Charlie Spencer, a’chya service.  An’ ‘oo’s this li’l number, then?”

The eyebrows that had risen before now hid themselves entirely in curly grey fringe. “This is my niece, Miss Roberta Wickham. She was very interested to meet you—”

“Oh, yes, _very,_ ” Bobbie cut in with her silvery voice, making her way past the elderly aunt and into my immediate presence. “Cousin Algy has told me all about you, Mister Spencer. He told me that I couldn’t miss the opportunity to join Aunt Millicent in meeting you… he was quite right.”

“Oh, well… That M—oh, I mean t’ say—er, that Algy… ‘e’s been a real ‘elp to me.” Bobbie swimming so close in my field of vision isn’t the best aid to comprehension. “Blimey,” I added by way of punctuation. The red-head’s smile grew as I spoke.

“Yes, yes… he said that he’d gotten you a job. It’s all Algy seems to talk about lately,” she said, finally skipping away from me and perching herself on the edge of my sad excuse for a sofa. She waved the aunt over with enthusiasm. Lady Millicent seemed to have lost her tongue to a member of the feline persuasion; the aged female didn’t say anything, but kept up with a vague blue gaze as she drifted over to the seat next to Bobbie. With the pair of them sitting there and looking up at me, I felt quite like a sideshow attraction. ‘The Wild Man of the East End,’ perhaps. A bag of peanuts would have completed the picture. “My cousin says that he’s really raised you up from the depths. _What_ is it you used to do? Before Algy came along, I mean.”

Now, what you must understand is that, for all his kindness and mercy, for all his wit and charm, Bertram W. Wooster is no thespian. He can play a pretty tune on the piano and sing gaily as a songbird, but when he is put before an audience and asked to act, he falls to pieces. He falters, fumbling over his lines and taking on the glassy gaze of a long-dead fish. All trace of the eloquence from his youthful performances of _The Charge of the Light Brigade_ had evaporated with age.

“Er… well… I was… rubber!... Er, I mean t’ say… I work wif rubber, m’Lady. Processin’ an’ such.” I admit I was proud of both my continued attempts at Cockney and my relatively quick recollection of the plan. It was only after a moment of bemused (on the part of Lady Millicent) and amused (on the part of Bobbie) silence before I realized I’d made a mistake.

“I thought that Algy said— ”

“No, no! My apologies, ma’am,” I cut in, waving the hands a little. The scheme couldn’t fall through my fingers as quickly as that. “Tha’s the job ol’ Algy wrangled for me, o’ course. No, before I met ‘im, I was in th’ streets. In and out o’ prison, you know. Couldn’t ‘old down an ‘onest job if I tried.”

“Prison? What _for?”_

I’d imagined that I would be grilled by the aunt, but, no. It was Bobbie throwing out the questions with a smile plastered on her face, followed by more of that infernal giggling. I didn’t understand. Did Bobbie truly find the downtrodding of her fellow man so amusing? I’d thought her better than that. Spritely and frolicsome, yes, but she had never struck me as hard-hearted.

Worse than the revelations about Bobbie, however, was that I had no idea what to say. I hadn’t worked out that aspect of Charlie Spencer. Was he an arsonist or a thief? An illegal gambler, perhaps?

“Well… you see… I did some time for… well, here and there—”

Thankfully, I was spared from having to invent a credible response. At that precise moment, a deafening _BANG_ issued from the next room, followed directly by a foul odor seeping out from under the pantry door.

Both of the females cried out and the elder clung onto the younger for support. I confess to a bit of a manly yell, myself. I imagine that one never really gets used to sudden explosions in their living quarters; as this was my first round with the experience, I think I had the right to some surprise.

The incident gave me the time to think and the excuse I needed, however, and I set to chattering as soon as I’d grasped the tail of a sensible explanation.

“Cor, blimey! Must be the gas again. I’ll ‘ave t’ ‘ave a talk wif ol’ Jack abou’ it.” The room was awfully quiet following the noise. I had to fill the void with something—a few closing words were as good as anything. “For now, I think you girls be’er be off. It’s bound to get righ’ smelly in ‘ere.” I offered a hand to Bobbie, which she took, still supporting the aunt on her other arm as she made towards the door. “Per’aps we might meet again some ovver day. I’ll be in touch wif Algy.”

I think the aunt may have been stuck by some sort of shocked cata-whatsit, for she didn’t say another word, and had taken on a glassy gaze as Bobbie led her from the room. Bobbie herself, however, had taken to her tittering again, and paused on the threshold.

“We’ll see you again soon, I hope.”

“O’ course! ‘Ave Algy come next time, won’t cha?”

“Certainly.” Bobbie cast a glance over her shoulder to Lady Millicent, who was conveniently lost in her empty gaze down the hall. Before I knew it, she had leaned up to plant a peck on my cheek. Bobbie, I mean. Not the aunt. My knees were distinctly jellified as she whispered in the old shell-like: “‘Bye, Bertie.”

“‘Bye….” It took the brain a moment to register anything beyond the lips that had met the Wooster visage. The feeling of floating on air didn’t last, however; Reason finally regained her throne, and words their meaning once more. “Er… Charlie! It’s Charlie! Charlie Spencer!”

“Good-night!”

With that, Bobbie disappeared into the night, giggles echoing down the hall in her wake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still workin' at this. Finding myself reading chapters over and over again and never being satisfied. Have friends read and review before publication, and still feel this way. Perhaps I should invest in a Beta reader, but, at the same time, am afraid of looking stupid in front of someone I don't know because of mistakes/problems. Hmm. Conundrums.
> 
> Anyhow, continued thanks for reading! It is greatly appreciated! :3


	8. Chemicals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bertie discovers some mysterious things. Mrs. Grayson sheds some light.

Bobbie Wickham has always been adept at distracting me. Why, she’d once made me think that she was working for the benefit of the Woosters, nobly dispensing knowledge to me in the battle against one Tuppy Glossop, when instead she was working both sides of the field in plain sight. It’s the hair that does it, I think. And the eyes. The lips don’t hurt, either.

Whatever the case, I’d managed to be distracted from the fact that a bally _explosion_ had occurred in the room where my valet resided, and I believed him to be in it.

As soon as I’d entered the flat again, I called out to said v., and hared over to the kitchen door. It was locked.

“Jeeves! Jeeves, are you all right? What’s happened?”

This Wooster has always been of an upright, stalwart personality. Never could it be said that he has been found looking up a girl’s skirt or cheating at cards or what have you. Perhaps it could be said that he has committed the occasional petit larceny of police equipment or he has become a trifle too under-the-surface in public, but these things are the results of a jovial rather than a corrupted soul. Thus, I’ve never taken to looking through keyholes. But this was _Jeeves._ And it was no simple thirst to look in at the man that drove me thus—his very life might be in danger!

I’ll tell you, dear reader, I shan’t be hastening to repeat the keyhole experiment. Barely had I a look into the kitchen—a look which granted little more than a peep at the pearly haze within—when a hot, stinging sort of feeling wafted over the corny-whatsit, and I was forced to draw back, clutching the burning eye and swearing not a little.

Once I’d mastered myself again and pressed a handkerchief to the streaming eye, I turned to the more practical approach, vis-à-vis knocking, rattling the doorknob and, my constitution pushed its limit, yelling.

“If you’re alive in there, answer me, Jeeves! _Please!”_

Maybe I was a bit dramatic. But I’d heard nary a sound from Jeeves since the blast, and honestly couldn’t work out how I would survive in the East End without him. I didn’t even know how to formally move out of this horrible place without him. (Would breaking of a rent agreement happen? How did one go about doing such a thing? Perhaps I could go on paying for the place forever—it couldn’t cost very much—but one preferred not to have to.)

Drama in the Peter Street apartment hardly ended with me, however. Without warning, and fast enough to nearly take off the substantial Wooster nose, the kitchen door swung open.

I wasn’t prepared for what greeted me on the other side of the door. It was Jeeves.

“Wooster!” I hear you crying from your cozy fireside reading-place. “Naturally Jeeves was behind the door! It’s where you last left him; it was his name you were _just_ calling!”

I grant all that to be true. But, you see… I’d never seen Jeeves in such a state as I did that evening. Rather, I’ve never seen _anyone_ in such a state, and the man who made his way out of the kitchen hardly seemed to _be_ Jeeves.

I mean to say, he had the essential elements of a Jeeves, all strong-framed and long-limbed and dark-haired. His facial features appeared unchanged, right down to the break that tweaked his nose off to one side. But there were some distinct differences between Jeeves and the man who rushed into the sitting-room: The first thing I noticed was the disheveled appearance. He had no coat on, nor a tie, and his hair was untidy. The second was his attitude. My valet was, by my estimation, in some state of distress—and this is the man I usually have to read by the behavior of his eyebrows. The eyes were red and streaming a bit like mine, and, as he made his way over to the window, he had nary a word to say to the young master. The man simply shoved the window open and leaned his head out, taking great lungfuls of the cold autumn air.

“Jeeves!” I was compelled to cry once more. Again, if I’d had my wits about me, perhaps I could have managed a little more calm. But I had no idea what to make of this new and frightening form my manservant had taken, and, truth be told, I was still shaken to the tips of my toes. “Jeeves… tell me what’s happened… I imagine you’re aware of the great bang from the kitchen—”

“Sir, _please,_ ” the man replied, in not only a hoarse voice, but a tone I’d have never thought could belong to him. It frankly told the young master to go and boil his head. He seemed to be breathing a little easier, but hadn’t yet turned back into the room. When he spoke again, it was without quite so much scorn. “Forgive me, sir… I shall be better directly. As to the kitchen, I was working on fixing the stove. I caused a small gas explosion on attempting to light the range. But everything is well now, sir; you needn’t trouble yourself with the matter any further.”

One always likes to believe Jeeves. He is, after all, a man of greater intellect than any man of my description could dream of being. I’d often wondered why he didn’t biff off and set himself up for Prime Ministering or some other profession better suited to his substantial brains. And Jeeves generally does well by me, even if it means a white lie or two proffered on my behalf. But I had the distinct impression that he was lying to the young master that evening. Despite what I’d said to Bobbie et.al., whatever the smell was seeping its way around the flat didn’t have the distinct edge of gas. It was something altogether fouler… but I had no idea what it might be.

Jeeves finally turned back from the window. The man’s forehead was visibly sweating, and the healthy tan that normally colored his skin had turned into something starkly pale. I had no doubt as to my next move.

“Jeeves,” I proclaimed, with all of the authority due the title of the Young Master, “take the rest of the evening off. You look as if you’ve risen from the grave.”

The man swallowed, and looked up at me since the first time since he’d burst into the drawing-room. The eyes that met the Wooster blues were wide, and the pupils blown out to the edge of his bluish irises. I wondered if he, too, had managed to burn his eyes with the mysterious gas from the kitchen.

“Thank-you, sir,” he muttered—another thing I’d never heard of Jeeves before; my manservant is ruthlessly articulate—and strode directly past me. About a minute later, he had seized his coat and bowler and was gone.

I hadn’t really expected Jeeves to flee the premises so quickly. I’d imagined (perhaps hoped) that he’d at least offer to clean up before he left. _I_ had no idea how to clean properly, after all.

Knowledge of cleaning was the least of my worries, as it happened. Why, I think I knew even less about what I could do on looking at the items around the kitchen. I found a setup the likes of which I’d never seen before: There was a flask of some sort smashed on the floor. On the counter, there was a stand propped up over a burner, and a mercury thermometer. There was a long tube that led down from the stand to a distinctly more intact flask, and _that_ was filled with the brightest red liquid—or anything—that I’d ever seen.

Knowing what had happened in the kitchen just a short time ago, I shouldn’t have touched any of this setup. It was undoubtedly bad for business. Curiosity slayed the moggie and all that. But I did anyway: I reached a single finger out and prodded the flask with the red stuff inside.

Touching the thing made me draw the hand back and clutch it, lest it should be tempted to do any more prodding. The flask wasn’t hot; rather, the liquid inside, when jostled, immediately turned a violent shade of green. More violent, even, than the eyes of Bingo Little on learning that his latest lass has taken up with the barman. It made my stomach do a kind of inverted twist that left me feeling queasy.

I cast my eyes about the place for something that was nearer to normalcy. Beside the great contraption was one of those stands for holding up a recipe book, but there was no book there—nothing at all for me to clear all this up, even a little. It was clear that this Wooster was dealing with things far beyond his comprehension.

In spite of all the confusion this spawned in me, I knew what I had to do. Within fifteen minutes, I was knocking on my landlady’s door. It was afterhours by that time, but I was convinced that this was the right way to go. Her slightly creaky voice sounded from the other side of the door asking me to wait a moment. When she appeared, it was in a thin, dust-colored dressing gown.

“Mr. Spencer!” She cried. I’d thought she would know my voice by that point. But, then, the last time we spoke, I was a little too shocked to put down many actual words. “What ever are you doing here?”

“Ah, Mrs. Grayson,” I did try my best at a casual voice. I sounded instead like some form of bullfrog struck down by laryngitis. “May I come in? I had some questions… regarding my accommodations.”

“Certainly, sir!” She stepped back to allow me in; I was met by the image of a tiny flat with one combined kitchen and sitting room, and a door no doubt leading to a miniscule bedroom. I couldn’t help but feel dashed awkward. These were quarters meant for a prisoner of war, not one’s friendly old landlady. Still, Mrs. Grayson set about with as much jollity as ever, scuttling about to make a pot of tea. I was only halfway into my seat when she served me a plate of ginger cake.

“I generally speak with Mister Jeeves about matters in your flat,” she said, cheerfully, standing at her stove, the sides of which were accented by spots of rust. “Is there another problem with the gas? I heard a sound upstairs some time ago….”

“Yes… er, I mean… no.” I didn’t really know how to move from the subject of the flat to that of Jeeves. I didn’t even really know how well Mrs. Grayson knew him. “There was a… problem, as it were, upstairs earlier. It’s done with now,” I said quickly, as she cast a pair of raised eyebrows over her shoulder at me, “but I worry. Jeeves caused the bang, but I really don’t know what he did. He had all this equipment laid out in the kitchen, you see. Tubes, flasks and burners and all the trappings.”

Mrs. Grayson seemed genuinely struck down by this commentary. I daresay she heaved a sigh as she set the tea, sugar and cream before me. The woman seemed distinctly stirred. Or shaken. One of those terms that suggested she’d been agitated as much as a strong cocktail. At any rate, she’d taken a seat across from me and stared long into the abyss before she spoke to me again.

“Mister Spencer… I haven’t told you everything there is to know about the flat.” I slopped a bit of the tea I had been about to drink over the side of my cup, undoubtedly making the dead fish look my aunts are so fond of. “Things happened there… unnatural things. I thought it had all ended with him… I thought that you boys would be safe, just staying for a few weeks….”

She stood again, and began pacing the length of the kitchen (a very short way, as it happens.) This Wooster could only listen and watch.

“It was in eighteen eighty-seven.” Mrs. Grayson had suddenly taken on the attitude of a burdened parishioner confessing a particularly dreadful crime. I was no priest—I couldn’t say I wouldn’t judge if she’d hidden something particularly dreadful from Jeeves and me—but I listened just the same. “There was a young man… a scientist, as I found out… he fiddled around with his experiments here. I’ll be damned if it wasn’t them that led to….” She paused, and said stonily, “He killed himself. Not _here_ … but he did.”

Jeeves had already clued me into this information, of course, but I didn’t need to let Mrs. Grayson know that. At any rate, she didn’t seem to notice the lack of appropriate shock from the Wooster face. She didn’t really seem to notice _anything_ but the story she was telling: she could only pace, and talk, and stare off into the distance, only to begin again once she finished a circuit of the cracked tile floor.

“I don’t know _what_ he was doing. I don’t think I’d understand if it was pushed under my eyes this minute. All I know is he was a polite boy when he first entered into our agreement… a little odd, but polite…and he changed. He became a vile creature. Did all sorts of foul things; one heard whispers about him around town within weeks. I wanted him out, excepting that he regularly paid his rent at a time when no-one else was….

“There _are_ reasons why I think the experiments are to blame. My grandson agrees with me.”

At last, I found my voice again. “Who’s your grandson? Did he know the man?”

“No, no… Herbert’s much too young… but, you see, my grandson fancies himself a chemist. He told me that the flat was safe to rent out again. Herbert helps me here sometimes; he’s a barman by trade.” I think she may have disapproved of this as much as my aunts disapproved of my continued bachelorhood, if her tone was anything to judge by. “He wants to attend university for chemistry, but I don’t know how he expects to, what with the late nights and low pay…. Anyhow, I think that Mr. Jeeves knows him from his nights at the King and Bishop.”

I spluttered with as much gentlemanly grace as I was able. “Jeeves _knows_ your grandson?”

“Yes… you know, I think that Herbert is a corrupting influence on young people. He’s a decent boy, of course. He’ll lend me a hand whenever he has the time. But all this _chemical_ drivel he talks… it simply flies in the face of nature. Trying to ‘alter man’ indeed,” Mrs. Grayson huffed, finally taking her seat and tea again. “I hope Mr. Jeeves hasn’t been taking in any of Herbert’s nonsense. The man is too clever for his own good. He’ll get ideas. He and my grandson would only encourage each other.”

I took some time to contemplate this. A good few minutes later I knew what _more_ I had to do.

“Mrs. Grayson,” I proclaimed, “I have no interest whatever in chemicals. I couldn’t tell a chemical’s head from its tail if asked. But I think I need to speak to this grandson of yours….”

Note from the esteemed landlady in hand, I landed on the doorstep of a small, shoddy-looking place in the depths of the East End not half an hour later. There was a pitiful sign above the door reading ‘The King and Bishop’ in faded letters; one doubted, looking at it, that it was fit for royalty _or_ clergy, let alone both. Still, I forged onward.

Entering the place proved me right. It was dark, lit only by dimly burning lamps. There were a few wooden tables and chairs, and a length of bar that appeared to be sloping downward at both ends. Behind said bar, cleaning out a cloudy pitcher, stood a young gent with dark hair and glasses with saucer-sized lenses.

There was no great shock for me in finding myself in such a disreputable place. I had been living in the E. E. for a time, and, besides, Woosters have stepped inside dives in the past. I recall a particularly galling time in which Florence Craye forced me to take her to one. The scent of alcohol and cheap cigarettes floating through the air did nothing to divert me from my goal, nor did the chorus of men singing a curious rendition of ‘Nagasaki’ from their corner seats.

What was surprising, of all of this, was the young barman. On seeing this Wooster, gave a great dive of his own and disappeared, wraith-like, into a room behind the bar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still... trying.... Hoping to get further in this thing once my struggles with mental illness decide to subside. XP
> 
> Many (belated) thanks to my best friends, Sir_Weston and Night_Witch_The_Third, for acquiescing to reading each chapter at least one billion times before I post it! <3


End file.
